PIMA asked me to write an article on Life-deep Learning. I have written abundantly on Life-long and Life-wide learning. The life-deep dimension is a necessary complement.
I decided to reflect on my own life-deep learning in a life dedicated to education through various roles: researcher, teacher, editor, translator, adviser, educational journalist, and activist.
From education to lifelong learning
My entry point to the world of education was adult education, a historically neglected field, subject to double discrimination: age and poverty. It is a field that stimulates empathy, a multidisciplinary, multisectoral and inter-generational mentality, and an impetus for social change. Organizing, directing, and evaluating a national literacy campaign in my country, Ecuador, with young people acting as literacy educators, has probably been the most intense and enriching professional experience I have been involved in. Watching an adult person learn to read and write, and write his/her name for the first time, with all the dignity and happiness that honour such act, is something extraordinary.
The acquisition of reading and writing is an ageless process and an endless continuum. Articulating child literacy and adult literacy is obvious and indispensable but resisted by society and by the education field. This is how I ended up embracing school education, family education and community education, and finally embracing the concept and the paradigm of lifelong learning, always from a human rights and a transformational perspective since education and learning need major changes. The personal blog I created in 2009 is called OTRAƎDUCACION (Another Education).
Writing
My father taught me to read and write when I was five years old and changed my life. Since then, I incorporated reading and writing as a life habit. Writing is often the first and the last thing I do in any given day. I have published several books and many academic and journalistic articles. I have nearly 700 articles in my blog (a similar amount is waiting in line). I have probably dedicated half of my lifetime to writing.
Writing is a profound and special pleasure: an opportunity to play with language, a phenomenal means of expression and communication, a learning method incomparable to any other one. Writing forces thinking, discipline, perseverance, rigour. When you cannot explain something in writing it is because you yourself do not have it clear. The natural flow between reading and writing is fascinating.
I generally write for pleasure, without anyone asking me or paying me for it. I also write research papers, evaluations, manuals, guides. Having a personal blog is having a space that is always available and at hand to write anything you want, privately or publicly. I always encourage teachers and students to create and manage their own blogs. I have taught ministry of education people how to do it, for example in Rwanda, Uruguay, and Mexico.
Re-reading
As life moves on one discovers the pleasure of re-reading. Besides rediscovering the book as if it were a new book, we rediscover ourselves, the persons we were when we read it, thanks among other things to the marks we left on the paper: notes, colours, underlining, and even residues of food and odours. Other ideas capture our interest because we ourselves are other people today.
I have re-read various books, in different epochs and with different motivations, most of them literature, psychology, linguistics, political science, sociology, and philosophy. Some of them books that I read when I was an adolescent or a young girl; I was curious to find out who I was then, and eager to experience once again the beautiful moments associated with those books. Or books that I read when I studied Psychology or Linguistics: Freud, Saussure, Chomsky. In recent years I have re-read books by Herman Hesse, Saramago, Todorov, Zygmunt Bauman, Paulo Freire, Quino, Montessori.
Traveling
Traveling is one of the more lasting and pleasant ways to learn. My professional choices and my knowledge of languages led me to traveling as a main means of work. From the beginning I incorporated school visits as a key activity and arrived a day earlier in order to be able to do it. Sound technical advice in the field of education requires immersion in the life and cultures of people. I have always found in those visits inspiration and valuable material to connect with people and with their experiences. Many of the articles I have written in all these years refer to these visits all over the world.
While preparing a study visit to Finland in 2015, I realized libraries had to be included in the visit. Finnish education policy includes reading as a key component, and the library system as a fundamental ally of the school system. The idea of education = schools is so deeply engrained in society that all other learning institutions and spaces, including libraries, become invisible. The Finnish experience is exceptional on many fronts, one of them being the education-reading connection.
Advising
Advising - governments, social organizations, international agencies - is something that I have enjoyed very much over the years. A good adviser learns permanently, observes, listens, explains, considers and proposes alternatives, tries to consult and work with the local people. In my long experience as an international adviser, I have witnessed the many flaws of international advice.
I was hired to work in Rwanda for three weeks to do research and work with a team of the Adult Education Department at the Ministry of Education in the elaboration of a literacy policy and programme for the country. Once in Rwanda I found out that the persons I was supposed to work with expected me to do all the work. That was the institutional modus operandi in the relationship with international advisers and consultants. I explained to the team that I could not work on this by myself and that it would be of no use for the Ministry and for the country. I managed to have them dedicate time to the project. Other advisers worked the proposals by themselves, without any participation by local staff.
In northern Thailand I was taken to visit a one-room school. Mr. Panya, the teacher in charge of the school, had organized various groups of students, according to their age, and had aligned them in front of chalkboards against the wall. He walked up and down assisting the various groups. I suggested him to organize the groups so that students could see and help each other. He accepted the idea. Together with the students we moved the tables, chairs and chalkboards and reorganized the groups. Teacher and students were happy with the result. Now that they could see each other’s faces, the students started to talk with each other. Mr. Panya was a bit nervous about it. I left and after a while had to come back since I had left a bag in the school. Everything was back to 'normal', in their original places. Innovating takes time, does not happen overnight. A big lesson I have never forgotten.
Going backwards
Education has lost historicity and historical perspective. Everything appears as new. Bibliographic references are recent; "old" references and authors have disappeared. Worries and debates focus on the future and the interest on the future does not lead to the past.
A few years ago, I started to feel the need to go back and recuperate readings of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. I regularly submerge myself in books and authors that are no longer mentioned or that are unknown to the new generations of educators and experts.
At the end of 2012, Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO, invited a group of experts to rethink education in the 21st century. The book Rethinking education: Towards a global common good? (UNESCO, 2015) was the result of this initiative. I was one of the experts invited. The first task we were given was to study the two previous international reports prepared at UNESCO's request: the Faure International Commission for the Development of Education, Learning to be (Faure 1972) and the Delors Report (International Commission on Education for the 21st Century, 1996). I had read the Delors Report but not the Faure Report. It was a pleasure reading it this time, forty years after it was written. It became clear to me why Mrs. Bokova decided to re-publish it in 2013.
Going backwards is both re-encounter and discovery, it helps to put both feet on the ground, it expands and enriches the vision. It confirms that innovations are not only in the future but also in the past, wonderful ideas that were abandoned or that were not perceived as important.
Cognitive biases and «evidence»
Discovering and studying so-called «cognitive biases» is important for those of us who dedicate to education, teaching, research, journalism or technical advice. I recommend including the study of cognitive biases as a regular feature in teacher education and training programmes.
Becoming aware and vigilant of the many cognitive biases our brain leads us to in an unconscious manner is a very interesting and fruitful exercise. One finds out how difficult it is to judge objectively, to get rid of so many types of biases and stereotypes, and to find the 'evidence' that is considered so precious today.
Just to give an idea to those not familiar with cognitive biases, here is a brief list of some of the most common ones.
Confirmation bias
- tendency to search for, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
- tendency for experimenters to believe and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve or downgrade the data that conflict with those expectations.
- tendency to reject new evidence that contradicts previous knowledge or beliefs.
Egocentric bias
- tendency to rely heavily on one's own perspective.
Framing effect
- tendency to draw different conclusions from the same information, depending on how it is presented.
Logical fallacy
- tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events.
Status quo bias
- tendency to defend and bolster the status quo.
Self-assessment
- tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability.
- tendency to believe that one is more objective and unbiased than others.
Association fallacy
- tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure.
Attribution bias
- tendency to judge human action to be intentional rather than accidental.
- tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures.
Conformity
- a collective belief gains more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse.
- tendency to do or believe things because many other people do or believe the same.
Learning to learn and to re-learn
Beginning to understand how learning takes place is an extremely powerful tool. Learning implies connecting the new information with previous information and understanding that if that new information contradicts somehow the old information our brain will try to reject it. Learning to learn is thus also learning to re-learn. Once we learn to learn and to re-learn we are much better equipped to become lifelong learners.
The more we learn and the more we know, the more we doubt and the more aware we become of how much we don't know. This is a lifelong, contradictory, and profound learning process that, if properly understood, makes us humble and modest. Life is wise in letting us know and accept that wisdom is an honest face-to-face encounter with our own ignorance.
* Rosa Maria Torres was a close friend of Paulo Freire and is a multilingual giant among Latino scholar-activists in andragogy and the policy and practice of lifelong learning and associated field of applied scholarship. An international adviser as well as a widely published researcher, she has lived in Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, USA and Argentina, working in the academic world as well as with social organizations, governments and international agencies, and undertaken professional missions in all Latin American and Caribbean countries as well as in many African and Asian countries. In Ecuador she was Pedagogical Director of the National Literacy Campaign,1988-1990, and Minister of Education and Cultures in 2003.
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